“All of us who worked with Heath accept this award with an awful mixture of sadness but incredible pride,” Nolan said. “After Heath passed on, you saw a hole ripped in the future of cinema. But with the extraordinary response to his work that we’ve seen all over the world, I, for one, start to look a bit less at that gap in the future and a little bit more at the incredible place in the history of cinema he built for himself with his talent and his dedication and his artistry.”

“For any of us lucky enough to work with him, for any of us lucky enough to enjoy his performances, he will be eternally missed but he will never be forgotten,” the director continued.